A Studious Use. Designing from the Undercommons

Giovanni Marmont

What if study was not about learning, improvement, accreditation? What if use was not about intentionality, function, ownership? 

A Studious Use invites readers to reconsider the habitual logics and material priorities at play in practices of both study and use. It examines their potential and actual interplay, unravelling the ways in which these are at once shaped by and reproductive of broader social, political, and cultural currents. Here Giovanni Marmont explores how a seemingly inoffensive commitment to the terms of individuation, as a manner of understanding and organising the world first and foremost as an aggregate of separate entities, carries with it profoundly harmful implications. With an eye toward the unseen possibilities of social life, he proposes an alternative mode of engagement with and through artefacts – studious use – predicated instead on our general, shared, practical indebtedness. Through a blend of theoretical critique, philosophical inquiry, and experimental design practices, A Studious Use offers a rethinking of sociality not as a coming together of independent, if interacting subjects and objects but, rather, as a primary, undirected, ongoing collective experiment.

“How do practices dispossess us? How does use reorient the very question of function and form? Where else can it take us beyond our-selves? In this compelling engagement with use-beyond-use-value, Marmont takes us on a journey to a non-binary account of use that refuses the limited account of any marketable claim. Instead, it moves use toward the surprise of constellations as experimental as they are quotidian.” – Erin Manning, author of For a Pragmatics of the Useless

“Beautifully written, intellectually generous and politically sharp, this is a stellar work of design studies. Marmont politicizes the often-depoliticized notion of ‘use’ within design discourse and practice. If taken seriously, this rare gem in the current landscape of design theory can potentially expand the horizons of what thinking and acting mean by and within designing.” – Mahmoud Keshavarz, author of The Design Politics of the Passport: Materiality, Immobility, and Dissent

Bio: Giovanni Marmont is a university worker currently based in Edinburgh, Scotland.

368 pages, 6 x 9

UK: £23 / US: $30     

ISBN 978-1-57027-396-4

Release to the book trade 1 March 2026

Released by Minor Compositions, Colchester / Brooklyn / Port Watson

Minor Compositions is a series of interventions & provocations drawing from autonomous politics, avant-garde aesthetics, and the revolutions of everyday life.

Minor Compositions is an imprint of Autonomedia

·     Original intervention in design theory, offering a vision of design as fostering new experiments in collectivity

·     Interdisciplinary appeal, working across philosophy, design studies, cultural theory, and political aesthetics

·     Relevant for practitioners & activists: speaks to designers, cultural workers, educators, and activists 

·     Engages with the crisis of higher education, draws on critical pedagogy in search for alternative modes of study, creation, and social life

BIC / Thema Codes

AK – Design, Industrial and commercial arts

JPW – Political activism

JHBA – Social Theory

BISAC

DES008000   DESIGN / History & Criticism

PHI034000    PHILOSOPHY / Social

ART037000   ART / Art & Politics

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